An alumna of Clarion West Writer’s Workshop for science fiction and fantasy, I’ve written for markets like The New York Times and Time Out New York. Currently, I write about sci-fi for Blastr. I also edit the humor competition for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and here at Forbes.

The Trailer for the Upcoming 'Mass Effect: Paragon Lost,' Disappoints

The first Mass Effect game is an RPG by BioWare about Commander Shephard’s journey to become a Spectre agent while fighting such enemies as the Geth, the Reapers, and other Spectre agents. It was so playable and fun that it spawned sequels, books, and comic books. Now the franchise has a new entry: an upcoming anime movie, Mass Effect: Paragon Lost. I have the trailer for you, below.

Written by Henry Gilroy (Star Wars: The Clone Wars), Paragon Lost is a prequel to Mass Effect 3. Although it seems that Shephard won’t be making an appearance, this film centers around James Vega, a character in Mass Effect 3 who is voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr. In the film, Vegas and his team must protect a colony from abduction.

I was really looking forward more Mass Effect…but then I saw the trailer. Sadly, the animation isn’t very polished. (I’m thinking 1990s work.) A good story could win me over, but I didn’t actually get one. I did see a few Krogan, so I can hope for some snappy one-liners.

At least the title, Paragon Lost, is catchy as hell.

The film will have a direct-to-DVD/Blu-ray release on November 13, 2012.

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The thing that boggles my mind is that EA keeps on making these anime tie-ins to their hard-nosed action games like Mass Effect and Dead Space. Is there really that much overlap between the kinds of people who watch anime and the kinds of people who play Mass Effect and Dead Space?

While I have no interest in ever spending more money on anything with Mass Effect in the title (or BioWare as the developer), I have even less taste in watching an anime adaptation of a franchise that doesn’t seem to be the least bit related to or inspired by anime. Why not just use CGI and go for the realistic look that the games are obviously striving for?

Further, why Vega? Literally everyone hated Vega. I haven’t spoken to a single person who played Mass Effect 3 and liked him. Literally the only thing he brought to the game was that I could learn Carnage from him (and thus never use him in my party again). A terrible character with a terrible personality.

The signs that EA has a hard time connecting with the fanbase are rather clear in this video: 1. Anime has limited appeal in the US (I say this as a fan of many Anime movies, TV shows and OVA’s). 2. They choose a main character with VERY limited appeal. 3. The movie they’ve made is a prequel, an often disappointing story in which the audience already knows the ending. In fact prequels are essentially showing his BACKSTORY, by nature less interesting than what we saw in the game. 4. Even if some fans have not sworn off the series completely, there is very little interest in the series compared to March of this year after Mass Effect 3′s mess of an ending.

EA’s problems are less about connecting with the fanbase, and more to do with getting greedy and arrogant. The drops in their share price have more to do with them predicting larger subscription numbers for The Old Republic than they got – Which might not be totally their fault as WoW has seen a drop in player numbers as well.

In this particular case some of the problems are at least understandable, since it would have been put into development long before ME3 was released – and also long before they came up with the {profanity} ending. At that point they would have had no reason to suspect that ME3 would end up as a (literal) joke and flatten the franchise. They probably should have foreseen Vega not being all that popular, given that the character would be competing with characters that have been around since the first game, and an alien species we’d only heard about. (If you have the From Ashes DLC anyway). He’s not by any stretch a bad character, just no where near as interesting as everyone else.

Prequels are often the bane of franchises, as George Lucas proved with Star Wars. The idea of seeing the story before the story sounds great on paper, but is almost always found lacking in execution since it is rather difficult to add tension when you know the main character isn’t going to die at any point.

I’m aware that ME3 and its attending controversy aren’t the only problem EA has right now, but I think it’s indicative of a larger problem in creating games that appeal to a large enough fanbase to justify the investment. SWTOR seemed viable with millions of subscribers paying $15 a month until you think about the $200 million budget. It’s subscribers are dropping fast and are unlikely to reach a point profitable enough to justify it’s existence past 2013.

Past that, I think EA’s habit of buying smaller companies (like Bioware) and cheapening their products may be coming back to bite them. While that works well in the short-term in the long-term it becomes expensive to keep paying the executive brought along with these companies at an executive rate of pay. Add to that that the games will slowly start to make less money a previous fans lose interest now that quality has declined.

Nice catch with the Star Wars comparison. The big difference here is that Mass Effect was not nearly as popular or culturally relevant as Star Wars, even before the ending debacle. It’s because of that broad popularity and relevance that the Prequels were so profitable. Paragon Lost seems unlikely to be anything more than a bomb if they ever get a general release.

“I’m aware that ME3 and its attending controversy aren’t the only problem EA has right now, but I think it’s indicative of a larger problem in creating games that appeal to a large enough fanbase to justify the investment.”

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I don’t think the problem rests with mass appeal in itself. What seems to be the problem with EA in particular, and the gaming industry in general, is greed. I noted some time ago in another article that there are two sides to games developers – the creative and the business sides. The former wants to make the ‘perfect’ game, the latter just wants money.

If the creative side gets too much control you end up with Duke Nukem Forever – meaning a game that is either never finished, or which takes so long to finish it becomes outdated long before it is on sale. If the business side takes over you end up with Dragon Age 2 – a game that *should* have been good, but which wasn’t given anything close to the amount of development time it needed.

EA is, unfortunately, in the hands of the business side. They are constantly trying to churn out titles as quickly as possible, with DLC added (or restored to the game depending on your take on things) in an attempt to rake in more money. What they need to do, certainly with Bioware, is find a good balance between giving developers enough time to produce a decent product while not giving them so much time they never finish. EA certainly doesn’t seem to understand that RPG games need more than 18 month development cycles – they need between 2-3 years if you are starting with an established game world, and maybe as long as 4-5 years if you have to create the game world (meaning its history, not the graphics ect). I can only sigh, and wonder what ME3 would have been like had Bioware been given an extra 6 months to work on the game – However this wasn’t going to happen, since EA clearly wanted the game released in just enough time that they could add in the first week sales of ME3 to its yearly accounts. This allowed them to seem in better shape that they really are.

As far as the Mass Effect films go – and there will be at least 2, with the potential for a full blown Blockbuster* – this is not all that surprising. Indeed Bioware were talking about the potential for Mass Effect to be converted into a film when the first game was released (because its structure is basically that of a film and this was intentional from the start). So while this is a business decision, it was not really one made by EA in many respects. The other problems Paragon lost may have…well that is just down to not thinking things through clearly on the creative side of things.

(*Paragon lost, then a live action film staring one Mark Meer’s – the voice of the Male Shepard. There is also a Mass Effect film conversion of the first game in the works – it is being produced by the same company that made the Christian Bale Batman films. However, the full film is in the VERY early stages of development, no one has been cast – or for that matter it appears that they are not even considering casting just yet – and one of the Bioware writers attached to the project is Casey Hudson. You may know him as the one who gave us that {profanity} ending to ME3. At this point, and with the backlash and apparent drop in interest in the franchise, it is possible that the Mass Effect film may be shelved.)

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” SWTOR seemed viable with millions of subscribers paying $15 a month until you think about the $200 million budget. It’s subscribers are dropping fast and are unlikely to reach a point profitable enough to justify it’s existence past 2013.”

***

As I said above, this may not be EA’s fault. MMO’s are VERY risky at the best of times, and times are certainly tough right now. It isn’t helping that the subscription model for MMO’s seems to be dropping out of favour with customers – free-to-play games *seem* to be the way forward right now. Several MMO’s, Star Trek Online being one of them, have moved to the F2P model and EA is considering doing the same for TOR.

If EA is guilty of anything, it was in badly overestimating subscription numbers – something that I think they admitted to having done.

****

“ Past that, I think EA’s habit of buying smaller companies (like Bioware) and cheapening their products may be coming back to bite them. While that works well in the short-term in the long-term it becomes expensive to keep paying the executive brought along with these companies at an executive rate of pay. Add to that that the games will slowly start to make less money a previous fans lose interest now that quality has declined.”

***

Agreed, and EA has a reputation of gobbling up smaller developers then running them into the ground by forcing them to push ‘new’ versions of existing franchises out of the door as quickly as possible…Until people simply stop buying them.

Doing this with Bioware may, however, be the last straw. It was a respected company with a strong customer base. EA’s insistence that they had to use the malware known as Origin, cutting bits of the game out to them sell as day one DLC and rushing development has alienated rather a large chunk of Biowares customers – at best customers are going to hold off buying anything they produce until they have conclusive evidence from customer reviews it is worth buying. Certainly they have managed to kill off a rather significant number of people who should, by rights, look at any Mass Effect films as something to look forward too. Instead I suspect the majority no longer give a damn, which is almost certainly going to cause problems for their hopes of creating a long lasting (and profitable) franchise that could, potentially, have been almost as successful as Star Wars or Star Trek.

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“The big difference here is that Mass Effect was not nearly as popular or culturally relevant as Star Wars, even before the ending debacle.”

***

Potentially Mass Effect could have been far more relevant that SW – the setting would allow you to high light everything from gender issues (through the monosexual Assari), through racism (Humans and aliens – which WAS a small part of the games anyway) to questions about morality and social issues. All of these could be handled without changing the universe in the slightest, and maybe more importantly Mass Effect doesn’t rely on ‘super-humans’, all of the characters are, well, ‘real’. Even those who can biotically push people through a wall are clearly ‘human’.

This is why I said it had the potential for be almost as successful as SW or ST – there was a great deal of scope there had they not insisted on the endings they did. (Which is one of the things that truly confuses me as to why they ever thought they would be a good idea on any level.)

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“Paragon Lost seems unlikely to be anything more than a bomb if they ever get a general release.”

***

If I’m understanding correctly, it seems that Paragon Lost will be a straight to DVD project – maybe a TV airing somewhere – but basically a DVD film. Marvel did this about 5-10 years back with animated avengers, Iron man and Doctor Strange films – and as it turned out they were really rather good as well as profitable.

However, I suspect that it isn’t going to be successful based on the general impression that most people have given up on Mass Effect, and many are feeling less than charitable in regards anything EA produces right now.

This is regardless of the quality of the film – it *may* turn out to be rather good…but I rather doubt that.

Wow. Mass Effect is a great universe (from the 3 games which I adored) and I have been eager to see what else they would do with it, but this trailer seems like it was written by someone who’s only knowledge of the games is seeing screenshots. Very disappointing. The dialogue … ack!